Simmons College
Simmons College has been my main area of focus for over a decade. While I've worked consistently on Simmons' web presence since 1995, I've worn many different hats while contributing to the same goal: building great websites. Twelve years ago, when I started at Simmons, no one understood the value of the site, how it should work, or who it should serve. Over the years, I've established a great group of designers as part of our full-time team, have established policies for updating the site, selected and implemented appropriate technologies to make it all "go", all the while playing a central role in the strategic direction of the web at the College.
The current group of sites live today are the result of a major university-wide rebranding effort, where I worked closely with senior College leaders, outside vendors and designers, and the Simmons web team. Over the course of the last five years, we've redone every one of the school's websites, bringing them visually together under one identity, with a unified information architecture. In addition, we moved Simmons' web presence toward web standards with each project we tackled. During this same time, we developed a College intranet site, as well as an Alumnae/i web portal. We've also focused a lot of thought and energy on how to make all of our sites more accessible to everyone. As part of this goal, I formed an Access Team to consider and advise on "best practices." Here's the general run-down for the redesign timeline: Undergraduate College (2003); the School for Health Studies (2003); Alumnet (2003); the School of Social Work (2004); the School of Library and Information Science (2004); the College of Arts and Sciences (2005); and, the School of Management (2005/2006), among others.
Since the launch of the first of the redesigned sites in late 2003, the number of qualified prospects delivered to admissions via the web has increased dramatically, with the College realizing a total 43% increase in enrollments during this same period. We've all been really pleased with the results, as increasing prospect traffic and conversion was a key goal from the outset.
In late 2004, CASE (District I) awarded Simmons College its "Gold" award as the "Best Overall Website," and the site has been noted for its advanced use of web standards by a variety of online publications, such as StyleGala. In 2005, the overall Simmons College website was featured as a Communications Arts "Site of the Week."
In addition to all the strategic planning, project management, graphic design, and programming I and my team tackle each day, I've also recently completed a multi-year Web Services Master Plan that outlines a comprehensive, cost-effective means of enhancing both the sophistication and efficiency of Simmons' web initiatives. To make this plan a reality, I sought and received substantial grant funding from the Davis Educational Foundation to aid in the Plan's implementation. Given the direction of the web, with all the talk of Web 2.0, and the focus on web application development, this planning process, and the much-needed resources it's brought to the College couldn't have come a day too soon. Out of this process, we hired a full-time web developer (surprisingly, our first), who's busy coding away on all the cool stuff we have planned for the future. I presented this master planning process, and the benefits from it, at the national CASE conference in 2005, and at NERCOMP in 2006.
